The first salad of the year: 23rd May(!)
For lunch yesterday I had the following:
A couple of slices of Yorkshire ham
A chunk of Stilton
A dollop of mayonnaise
Some chilli chutney
A pear
Some mixed salad leaves.
It was extremely tasty – the salad leaves were from the garden and were beautifully crisp alongside the ham and cheese. What’s strange is that this was the first batch of salad leaves I’ve actually picked this year. Normally by late May I’d have been chomping on rocket, chives, pea shoots etc. for about a month or so. But the weather has been so cold that – like everything else – the salad side of things is very much delayed.
Also picked the first batch of rhubarb today. There should be enough for several crumbles this year, as our rhubarb patch is finally getting established. As for the strawberries, they are coming along but still no ripe fruit. Maybe the first week in June?
Categories: crops Tags: rhubarb, salad leaves, strawberries
Trays of tomatoes… and strawberry corner
| Today was spent potting up tomato seedlings (see below), and also moving some sluggish strawberry plants from the back garden to the front, where they will in theory get several hours of sun a day rather than just half an hour or so. The display of strawberry plants in the corner actually looks quite attractive in its own right, I think. Of course, the roofless greenhouse to their left (not seen in pic) is definitely NOT a thing of loveliness, but it does act as a convenient shelf for more long trays of strawberry plants. Who knows, I might actually end up picking a dozen strawberries a day at the height of the season, rather than six or so as I did last year. To pot up the strawberries into their respective containers, I used neat home-made compost – which should mean that they’ll be happy! I wish I could be self-sufficient in compost, because that’s easily my biggest expense as a container gardener. Back in March, I syphoned off a good amount of nearly-rotted compost from our Dalek into the hole next to it; six weeks later under its layer of old carpet/bathmat, it’s now ready to use but I need more! |  |
| On to the tomatoes. It takes a looong time to pot up this many seedlings. The ones on the left in the yoghurt pots are Brandywine; the ones on the right are Gardener’s Delight. Large yoghurt pots make excellent pots for seedlings – just create some holes in the bottom first (I use one end of a skewer, held in a gas flame, to melt the holes – the plastic is less likely to crack that way.) |
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Categories: compost, container type, crops Tags: brandywine, containers, gardeners delight, strawberries, tomatoes